Internet surfers beware: More Meta data breaches this week

September 17, 2015

Here was another reason to worry that didn’t have anything to do with the NSA and their meta data policy. The good news was that the Excellus breach did not affect me, because my branch was located in another state and backed by a different insurance company. There was a big sigh of relief from me after checking the back of my Medicare RX card. I feel for those that were affected by this trouble. Not even the breach from Reverbnation had me worried. A password was easily changed. No credit card data was compromised.

Identity theft was hard to prove, especially when a lot of people were hesitant about using the internet to buy goods and pay bills. A security breach of any kind had a profound effect on someone’s psyche. Just using someone’s picture off the web had my skin crawling.

One should do the following:

Monitor their credit score

bank balances

credit card charges

telephone calls

Serveral other companies that merged this summer had also been hacked into for personal information. And this blogger worried about the hastening of Armageddon. Both the FTC and other government agencies were ‘under the gun’ so to speak, to upgrade their database security systems or face a lot more hackers and lawsuits. One thing in my favor was LifeLock. My inability to afford a monthly fee was removed when it was offered for free with one of my email accounts. It would’ve been foolish of me not to act on this after three of my credit cards were compromised last year. Of course, the way my money was issued, my medical and my bank accounts were protected along with most of my credit cards.

The last one on this list just got a little easier with ways to identify strange numbers calling on one’s landline and cell phone. The more information one gave the FTC the better they were at catching these fraudulent people. The laws for a lot of government agencies hadn’t caught up to the digital age yet. The burden of proof still rested with the accuser. Once this caught on in May of this year, my phones stayed silent for up to two weeks between calls. The bad news was that my name and phone number was in the database for anyone to call, spoof or not. The ironic thing was the man that used the name I reported last August called this August from that same company. Instead of a thick Indian or Pakistani accent, he had an English one by way of England, Australia, or New Zealand.

The biggest problem with this was the company’s resistance to sound the alarm when a hacking occurred. As much as two years went by before the first company told the public. That was ‘normal’. It didn’t make people cement their trust in the government though. Stiffer pnalties should be implemented for those that defraud people. For example, make them pay back what they stole instead of giving them a fine of one tenth the amount.